KEY POINTS:
Unlike grimy, busy London, Paris still moves at a relatively stately place. The boulevards are usually uncluttered, even at rush hour. It's almost always possible to get a decent table in a good restaurant without a reservation, even on Friday night. But as it slowly dawns that Paris is a sedate haven for the middle-class and the middle-aged, the fashionable areas of town - the so-called beaux quartiers - can suddenly seem not just beautiful but eerie.
This phenomenon is most marked just south of the Champs-Elysees, near Place de l'Alma, where Diana met her death. This is the heart of Paris, the most important and cosmopolitan city in Europe; but with its empty avenues and silent and uninviting streets, it can look just like the opening scenes of a zombie movie. It's then that you ask yourself the question that has been nagging you since you arrived here: where have all the young people gone?
Interestingly, the flight of young people has also become a burning issue in the French press, including Le Monde and, most notably, the daily Le Parisien, which for months has regaled its readers with the tales of young Parisians finding the good life at the other end of the Eurostar. Indeed, the real issue in this election - at least for young voters - is not la securite (crime and delinquency), but unemployment.
The politicians who are arguing that they will clean up the streets are still fighting the last election; meanwhile, young people in France look at the latest statistics - one in eight unemployed in some parts of Paris - and begin to despair of ever making a living in France.
The simple fact is that, in the past few years, young people have been leaving France in unprecedented numbers. More worrying still is that although depopulation was a worry in the French countryside in the Sixties, it now has become a specifically urban phenomenon. Nor is it confined to Paris: Lyon, Lille, Bordeaux and Marseille can all report an exodus of young people towards les pays Anglo-Saxons (the United States and the UK).
The echoes of the riots of November 2005 are never far away in discussions of the new French emigrants. This was when, for more than a month, the suburbs outside more than 20 French towns burned as youths torched cars and fought the police, triggering the call for a state of emergency. The riots were blamed on poor housing and heavy-handed policing.
No official recognition of racism has taken place. And so resentment lingers.
Le Parisien has highlighted the examples of young Arabs from North Africa who have escaped racism in France to find good jobs in London. According to Algerian singer Rachid Taha, based in Paris, this racism is a legacy of the Algerian war of independence from 1954 to 1962. "An Algerian in France still frightens the French," he says. "They think he's still a terrorist who'll cut your throat for nothing." In London, Algerians talk about their absorption into a friendly Anglo-Asian, Muslim community.
"Who are we going to vote for now?" asked the headline on the cover of Technikart, the hippest and most influential youth-oriented magazine in Paris. Inside, journalists analysed the "disarray" of the young generation of voters when confronted with the "non-choices" of front-runner Nicolas Sarkozy and Segolene Royal, the later starter Francois Bayrou and the sulphurous Jean-Marie Le Pen, leader of the National Front.
In the same issue novelist Virginie Despentes, the voice of youthful feminist dissent in France, said she would not vote for any of the "fakers and frauds on offer. Better to leave France for good."
And Marc Weitzmann - one of the most influential figures on French youth in the past decade, a novelist and former editor of rock magazine Les Inrockuptibles - said Sarkozy was the only choice. In a recent interview, Weitzmann declared that the intellectual left was dead in France, strangled by middle-class and middle-aged functionaries who despised youth and sought only to enhance their pension plans.
Following Weitzmann, Mehdi Belhaj Kacem, probably the most fashionable and dashingly youthful philosopher (he's in his early thirties) on the Left Bank, writes of "democratic nihilism" and describes France as a "failed state". Didier Lestrade, founder of the Aids campaign group Act-Up, puts the angry voice of the French clearly: "We're sick of voting against things. When are we going to have someone that we can vote for?"
The emigration of so many young people is seen most threateningly in the press as the victory of Anglo-American capitalism (most French youngsters dream of London or New York) over the French socialist model. But there is more at stake than money and jobs. Racism, poor housing and the stagnant nature of French society are also, damagingly for the present Government, all cited by the present generation of young people as reasons to get away.
"It's not that I dislike Paris or France," I was told by Jerome Leboz, a young Breton who came to Paris from Morbihan with his parents as a small child, "but it's just become more and more impossible to see any future here if you're French." Leboz is 24 and has a good job as a junior manager at a factory in the suburb of Levallois. But his salary barely covers his rent (in a low-grade apartment in the suburbs) and his bank refuses to give him any form of loan, let alone a mortgage, until he can name the day that he will have enough capital accrued to pay it off.
"It's a trap," says Leboz. "Everybody in France wants security - in their job and house - but if you are young you are denied access to owning your destiny for so many reasons. I work hard but it can seem pointless. I have enough money for a few drinks and maybe a club at the weekend, but so what? It's not a future."
Leboz is up against the unbending nature of French society, which, in contrast to the liberalising movements in the rest of the Western world, is still a mixture of rigid bureaucracy and heavy-handed paternalism. More specifically, the so-called taxe Delalande - a crippling levy on any company that sacks anybody over the age of 45 - means that businesses are weighed down with an ageing workforce and unable to offer jobs to younger workers.
But most telling of all, especially in a country that prizes education, is the rocketing number of jobless graduates. According to a survey conducted by the Centre for Research on Education, Training and Employment of 25,000 young people who left education in 2001, 11 per cent of graduates were unemployed in 2007. Unemployment was even higher - 19 per cent - among those without a degree.
Those really are staggering figures - the new unemployed of France should represent the future. Instead, they add up to a massive wave of youth disaffection, which may indeed be the real deciding factor in the elections.
Frederic Castor, a 30-year old black from French Guiana, a would-be writer and music fan, is also convinced that France has become less racially tolerant and more dangerous. He has stopped going into central Paris more than is strictly necessary.
"I cannot take the humiliation of being searched by police for nothing, and I hate the gaze of white people when that happens. It's a complete humiliation.
"What we are seeing in France is two sorts of apartheid - first there is the hatred of young people, and then there is the hatred of people of colour. To be young and black in Paris is a source of dishonour and shame.
The "flight of youth" from France is no mere reflection of temporary unemployment statistics, but marks a generational change.
Youth emigration on such a massive scale is the clearest signal of all that France is in deep trouble. "Of course I am patriotic and glad to be French,' says Frederic Castor, contemplating the new horizons of Southwark or Brooklyn. "But the problem is - for how much longer?"
* Andrew Hussey is the author of Paris: The Secret History.
- OBSERVER
